All other (non-default) DICOM Transfer Syntaxes employ Explicit VR in their encoding, and therefore any Private and/or Standard Data Element Value Field encoded and decoded using any Transfer Syntax other than the DICOM Default Little Endian Transfer Syntax, and not having been translated to the DICOM Default Little Endian Transfer Syntax in the interim, will have a known VR.

If at some point an application knows the actual VR for a Data Element of VR UN (e.g., has its own applicable data dictionary), it can assume that the Value Field of the Data Element is encoded in Little Endian byte ordering with Implicit VR encoding, irrespective of the current Transfer Syntax.

This VR of UN is needed when an Explicit VR must be given to a Data Element whose Value Representation is unknown (e.g., store and forward).

This VR of UN is also needed for the encoding of Data Elements with Explicit VR whose Value Length exceeds 65534 (2¹⁶-2) (FFFEH, the largest even length unsigned 16 bit number) but which are defined to have a 16 bit Explicit VR Value Length Field.

The Value Length Field of VR UN may contain Undefined Length (FFFFFFFFH), in which case the contents can be assumed to be encoded with Implicit VR. See Section 7.5.1 to determine how to parse Data Elements with an Undefined Length.

An example of a Standard Data Element using a UN VR is a Type 3 or Type U Standard Attribute added to an SOP Class definition. An existing application that does not support that new Attribute (and encounters it) could convert the VR to UN.